Nadia Davids

Biography

Nadia Davids grew up in Cape Town, South Africa.

In June 2008, Nadia Davids received a PhD in Drama from the University of Cape Town (UCT) for her thesis entitled "Inherited Memories; Performing the Archive", which explored the history, memory and trauma of forced removals from District Six under the Group Areas Act during the Apartheid era in South Africa, through the lens of performance.

She held a Mellon Fellowship between 2000 and 2005, and was a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (2001) and New York University (2004-05).

She was one of ten playwrights participating in the New York-based Women's Project Theater’s Playwrights' Lab for 2008–10.

She took up a full-time lecturing position in the Drama Department at the Queen Mary University of London in September 2009.

In 2017 Davids was elected president of PEN South Africa, taking over tenure from Margie Orford.

Works

Davids’ research sits at a nexus between Postcolonial Studies, Performance Studies and Live Performance. Her work contributes to the performative reimagining of South African archives and stages questions around trauma, cultural memory, the (im)materiality of the archive, of race, place and gender. Through themes of place, home, exile, resistance, and restitution, she examine material loss, engage with performative tactics of re-construction of place through memory, and suggest an ideological flow between oral history, witnessing, and theatre. She reference different contexts in which these experiences have been formed — District Six, slavery, colonialism, apartheid, immigration, post-9/11 racial/ethnic profiling, interstitial creolized identity formation-through various creative practices: theatre, short stories, documentary and screenplays. In this, she disrupts the assumed boundary between theoretical and practical work, insisting instead on a relationship of reciprocal intellectual and creative exchange. Her work is disseminated through a variety of forms (journal articles, live performances, published play texts, film documentaries, a novel) to a range of audiences (commercial, academic/educational).

At Her Feet (2002–12) — a one-woman show centred on Cape Muslim women’s identities post 9/11 performed by acclaimed South African actor Quanita Adams, and Cissie (2008–11) — a play exploring feminist biography, the historiography of District Six, and archival storytelling through the theatrical imagining of anti-apartheid activist Cissie Gool’s life - serve as good examples. Both works have garnered theatre awards and nominations (five Fleur de Cap Theatre Awards, one Noma, one Naledi), and have been staged internationally (in Africa, Europe, the United States at venues such as Market Theatre, Baxter Theatre, Southbank Centre, and at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, Afrovibes, and the London Book Fair). The plays are studied at a range of universities (University of Cape Town, Stanford, New York University, SOAS, University of Warwick and York University) and are high-school set-works throughout South Africa. They are understood within these contexts as opening up unexpected spaces in which the lives of South African — specifically Muslim Cape Tonian — women, assume the central focus. At Her Feet was one of the first theatrical works to emerge in response to 9/11 and one of the only plays that narrates the lives of Cape Tonian Muslim women.

Davids was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for her current research on Prestwich Place, a slave-burial ground Cape Town.

Her play At Her Feet was first performed at the Arena Theatre, Cape Town, in 2002.

Her play Cissie, about the life and memory of Cape Town activist Cissie Gool, debuted at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in July 2008.

At Her Feet and Cissie are studied at a number of universities including UCT, UWC, Stanford, UCLA and SOAS.

Her first novel, An Imperfect Blessing, was published in April 2014 by Random House Struik-Umuzi, and in December 2014 was announced as one of three books shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. The novel was longlisted for the Sunday Times Award and shortlisted for the UJ Prize.

Her most recent play 'What Remains' about slavery, the Cape, the haunted city, and the now was staged at the Arena Theater in Cape Town in April. It was directed by Jay Pather and featured Quanita Adams, Faniswa Yisa, Shaun Oelf and Ameera Conrad.

In May 2016 Davids has hosted a BBC podcast on Shakespeare in South Africa.

Awards

Davids was awarded the Rosalie van der Gught Award for Best New Director in 2003.

In 2006, she was a finalist in the South Africa Pen Award adjudicated by Nobel Prize laureate J. M. Coetzee for her short story "Safe Home" and in 2009 she was placed third for "The Visit".

She was nominated for the 2007 Noma Award for her play At Her Feet.

Cissie (2008) was nominated for three Fleur de Cap Awards, including "Best New South African Play".